Tranquility (20 page)

“You're wrong. It simply makes me mad that because one of the boss's drinking partners happened to finish his scribbling just now, the publisher's budget is ‘modified,' that things are still being done in the same old way.”

“Maybe it's a drinking partner, but you can't be sure it's only some scribbling.”

“But it is.”

“It isn't.”

“You shut up. I hate that there are more writers in this country than people who know grammar.”

“Yes, I never know myself what's correct,
let
me be or
leave
me be.”

“Don't bother me with that now. I'd be grateful if you hugged me at last.”

“How grateful?”

“In the given circumstances: fairly,” she said and hugged me, and then I helped her into her coat because since her stay at Kútvölgyi hospital, a hug like this had been the extent of “in the given circumstances: fairly.” To this may be added how on Margaret Island she'd grabbed a handful of branches and brushed every bud off them.

.   .   .

“I saw a picture at old Rosenberg's,” I said.

“A-ha,” she said.

“Judit's money just got here. I'll buy it tomorrow.”

“Judit is not a fool,” she said.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. She is very smart to send enough for the monthly expenses.”

“Hate my mother, if you want; leave Judit alone.”

“I'm sorry. By the way, I don't hate your mother, either.”

“You know damn well that Judit . . .”

“Of course. I said I was sorry. What kind of picture did you see?”

“Doesn't matter. Some landscape. I liked it.”

“Show it to me before taking it home.”

“I wanted it for here.”

“I got unused to them,” she said.

“To landscapes?” I asked.

“Paintings.”

“When did you get unused to them?”

“That doesn't matter at all,” she said.

“Of course not,” I said and was already certain that in her young girlhood some graying vulture had swooped down on her, a kind of ersatz painter and ersatz father, and with his last manly strength clipped her and then left her strapped to the hospital bed for the abortion and the shock-therapy because over sixty it's a great boon to find somebody who takes even our belching for wise statements and is willing to struggle with our flaccid cock for hours, but we don't much like it if the cheeky little thing gets pregnant. “I can't stand even the smell of turpentine, my sweet. No, I've no use for soiled diapers anymore, so here, take these two thousand forints and take care of it. Come on, what good would I do there? You're a big girl, aren't you? Besides, I don't have the time. But, as a compensation, I'll have a showing at the Ernst Museum, and it's all about you”; and because of the opening he can't visit the neurology-psychiatry ward, but he is very sad, which all his colleagues and the critics can see, and which earns him a few extra points. But I'll find him and kill him, I thought. I'll find him if
it's the last thing I do, I thought. I'll kill him without hesitation, I thought. If need be, I'll have him exhumed and smash his bones, I thought. I'll pour salt all over his grave. Yes, I'll cover it with salt, and then urinate on it.

.   .   .

Nothing special, actually, only bleak plough fields under the damp sky, as if stagehands had just removed an oversized backdrop. No crows, no twilight, no thicket, not even a world's end; oil on canvas, maybe forty-by-sixty centimeters, including the black frame. Probably the work of a provincial minor master, inspired by Millet's
Angelus
, who always had problems with the human figure; he left out the man and the woman and, with them gone, he did without the wheelbarrow as well; the coffin has already faded, even in the original. In short, only the background is left, and the painter thought he'd re-prime the canvas because what was left was not enough. Then something unexpected must have cropped up.

“This is the one, isn't it?” Eszter asked and took the picture out from behind the desk.

“Yes,” I said, because in my astonishment I could think of nothing else.

“Then get me a nail and hammer.”

“How did you know?”

“Either I'm on really good terms with second-hand dealers or I really know you. Or maybe both. It wasn't that difficult to fish it out from among the mandolin-playing gypsy girls and the bellowing stags,” she said and hugged me.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Where shall we put it?” she asked.

“Kiss me,” I said.

“First bring me a hammer.”

“I want to make love,” I said.

“No, we shouldn't, yet,” she said.

“You're lying,” I said and we stared at each other while I undid the belt of her dressing gown, and that's when I saw her naked for the first time after two months. If we don't count the dressings and undressings in the hospital, and the times I took her to pee in the chlorinated shit-smelling toilet at the end of the corridor in the neurology-psychiatry ward, because she'd often hold it until I got there so nurse Bertuska wouldn't have to put the dirty bedpan under her. She would have liked to flee, but I sat on her like a lunatic angel who took it into his head to put back together, down to the last crater, the full moon that had been smashed by accident.

“Don't,” she said.

“Shush,” I said, and the nipples were beginning to glow under my breath. My face was flush against her belly; when I reached her loins her whole body was trembling.

“Don't,” she said again, but my fingers, covered with the dew of her own loins clung to her mouth, then penetrated her lips to paralyze her with her own sea-flavor. My tongue tasted all the nerve endings of desire and she slowly began to leave her memories behind. First, she forgot my mother and the suggested flophouse, and then the Bólyai Crater and the wrecks of the Mare Tranquillitatis. When she couldn't even remember whether it was dawn or late afternoon and when she also forgot how to breathe, then my hand forgot its own strength and in the next moment it felt neither the fingers rubbing her clitoris nor the nails plowing her breasts. She did not hear her own screaming, she felt nothing but the insane drumming of the heart inside the ribcage, and then both light and darkness ceased,
God's watch in heaven stopped, and in hell all of Dr. Vidák's instruments melted.

I kissed her loins' spume into her mouth as I would a real pearl. “I love you,” I said and knew the real Eszter Fehér came back to life, the one who would never again brush the buds off the branches of the golden rain. “Does it hurt?” I asked, but she could no longer create words out of the sounds she was making. Each sound separately, panting and breathless, was fleeing from the loosened net of consciousness. Her tongue crawled one more time across the arch of my palate, wiggled its way into the crevice between the lips and the gums, her saliva dripped down my throat, but the instant the muscles thrust against me began to pulse, she grabbed me with a thousand hands and hurled me from herself; I only felt her fists pummeling my face.

“You lousy shit! You shit! Shit!” she screamed; I let her continue hitting me, and then she toppled over me, sobbing.

.   .   .

Where have you been son?

You know very well where, Mother.

I see you've already had a real fight.

Some characters started with me on the street, Mother.

Don't take me for a fool.

We didn't hit each other, and we never will. I told you, some guys on the street, Mother.

In other words, she had herself knocked up, didn't she?

Please, stop it, Mother.

The little bitch. Didn't I tell you?

You'd better not say anything now, Mother.

Her kind is good only for you to ease your load once in a while!

Ever since I was a kid, I've been easing my load in the bathtub, Mother.

.   .   .

It was in those days that the pigeons began to die. I saw the first ones on Gutenberg Square; four or five of them lying on the pavement and on the curb, as if the puddles had grown wings, but in fact, it wasn't too unusual since in the spring they always die like flies. They somehow survive the winter months, but with the thaw, they start dropping from roofs, ledges, and windowsills. There was a case once when the carcasses completely blocked a chimney and in the morning, six-month-old little Ágnes was the only one in her family who awoke, because her grandma had forgotten to build a fire in the nursery. But for three weeks, nobody noticed in the Kispipa Restaurant or in the carpet section of the Lottó Department Store or in the Life for Your Retirement pensioners' club that the Bodnárs were unjustifiably absent. By the time fellow tenants reported that something was amiss – it was almost Easter, and their neighbor hadn't thrown any of her mother-in-law's clothes or bedding into the courtyard since April 4
*
– even little Ágnes was rapidly decomposing. The authorities said let's give them a few more days; maybe after the holiday. Finally they broke the door down and the Bodnárs made it to the front page of
Estihírlap
as a human interest story between the news about the latest results of Mars exploration and the progress of spring plowing, but by then even the paper the news was printed on stank of death.

“Yuck. Get something else. See what they write about Dürenmatt. And try to read a little clearer,” Mother said.

“Funny, it's pretty clear to me: four people died. True, none of them was a Kossuth Prize winner,” Judit said.

“Maybe my sense of tragedy is not as refined as yours,” Mother said.

“There's only a very short notice of the premiere,” I said.

“Nobody has a perfect set of sense organs. I, for example, can hear pretty well, but sometimes for weeks don't
see
what's going on around me,” said Judit and collected the plates.

“A woman should learn to see even in the dark,” Mother said.

“If you're in a hurry, I can do the dishes,” I said to Judit.

“Thanks. By the way, it's not a bad way to do it. If I wanted to kill somebody, I'd probably do it like that,” Judit said.

“I'll look in Népszabadság,” I said, and still hadn't heard anything.

“A few dead pigeons in the chimney, and the story is guaranteed to make the headlines,” Judit said.

“Very inventive. Provided you can catch pigeons,” Mother said.

“With the right inspiration, sooner or later one can do it, yes. This burger was very good, again. Thanks for lunch,” said Judit and hurried off; and until the end of the heating season, in response to alleged requests by the tenants' committee, the chimney leading to Mother's room was checked five or six times.

.   .   .

In short, the first pigeons I saw on Gutenberg Square, then on Lujza Blaha Square, where the sidewalk was black with them. People were grumbling; what the hell's going on, and where are the public sanitation people when you need them? Some blamed the communists, some the extreme right, but the majority had no doubt that the epidemic had something to do with the atomic plant at Paks, and the following day the first political analyses appeared, weighing the effects of a possible mass demonstration on
the Hungarian energy industry. State TV referred to unofficial sources, investigative reporters ferreted out everybody qualified to comment on the problem, and there were people who remembered and were now willingly recalling, in prime time, similar pigeon devastations. The Municipal Health Service alone found it appropriate to announce that despite appearances, this was not an epidemic, but parents should not allow their children to play with pigeons. Eszter and I happened to be going to the Indoor Market and crossing the plaza, I noticed an old woman who from a paper bag was throwing seeds to the pigeons while repeating the words: Rebeka is eating.

“She's the one,” I said to Eszter.

“Who?” she asked.

“That woman by the swings. She is the one who poisons the pigeons.”

“Come on,” she said.

“I know her,” I said. “It was at her place I saw those twenty-five cages in the closet.”

“That's not the way I pictured her,” she said. “Besides, somebody living with crippled birds wouldn't feed poisoned seeds to pigeons. That's silly.”

“You're wrong,” I said. Then we did our shopping.

.   .   .

When I received the letter to come on the sixth, for two days I threw up even my morning coffee. I considered all the possible questions and pre-composed the most impersonal answers. If push comes to shove, I'd say let's leave the whole goddamn thing, I thought, and instead of taking the paternoster I walked up the stairs to waste some more time, though I had never ridden a paternoster. When they called my name, I noticed that here too the door handles were made of aluminum.